addon-operator VS kube-fledged

addon-operator has no built-in magic around Helm, it basically runs "helm upgrade --install --values GENERATED_VALUES.yaml" to install a chart for the module. I guess that you can use beforeAll or beforeHelm hooks to transform files in the templates folder with whatever tool you have in the image. Although it's not an immutable way, still it is possible.

Exactly. Part of the appeal to consolidate all of our container images to use Debian-slim is the ability to optimise the caching of layers, both in our container registry but also on our kubernetes cluster’s nodes (which can be done in a consistent manner with kube-fledged[1]).

[1] https://github.com/senthilrch/kube-fledged

If you're pulling big images you could try kube-fledged (it's the simplest option, a CRD that works like a pre-puller for your images), or if you have a big cluster you can try a p2p distributor, like kraken or dragonfly2.

Also there's that project called Nydus that allows starting up big containers way faster. IIRC, starts the container before pulling the whole image, and begins to pull data as needed from the registry.

https://github.com/senthilrch/kube-fledged

https://github.com/dragonflyoss/Dragonfly2

https://github.com/uber/kraken

https://nydus.dev/

kube fledged - pre pull containes in nodes: https://github.com/senthilrch/kube-fledged

kube-fledged is a kubernetes add-on or operator for creating and managing a cache of container images directly on the worker nodes of a kubernetes cluster. It allows a user to define a list of images and onto which worker nodes those images should be cached (i.e. pulled). As a result, application pods start almost instantly, since the images need not be pulled from the registry. kube-fledged provides CRUD APIs to manage the lifecycle of the image cache, and supports several configurable parameters in order to customize the functioning as per one’s needs. (URL: https://github.com/senthilrch/kube-fledged)

I found recently this tool kube-fledged that should do what you want..

I recommend you also look at kube-fledged this is more appealing IMHO.